Meta

Archive for May, 2013

CitySourced, employing iCityHall technology, is a mobile engagement platform that lets citizens or municipal officials take photos or video and use their GPS to track a location. It contains a suite of APIs that can be integrated into the AMS, CRM or GIS Systems of municipalities.

This is not rocket science for users. These APIs can be used by municipal officials who don’t have time to learn new processes. The CitySourced App uses a mobile camera and GPS to track down the exact location of a problem, such as a power outage or utility equipment out of service. For citizens, the system pushes a status update back to the reporting person’s mobile phone.

Esri aerial view comparisons of Moore, Oklahoma before and after the tornado hit. Plaza Towers Elementary School was one of two schools in the path of the tornado. Seven children died at Plaza Towers, which was flattened by the storm.

Esri’s interactive map is available for the media to embed or share as part of ongoing tornado and severe weather coverage. View the tornado’s path and damage radius, schools in the area, and where the general public can dropoff relief supplies. You can also explore geotagged social media from Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr overlaid on 2012 population density data.

For those who did not get a chance to attend the Esri Geodesign Summit 2013 in Redlands, Calif. or who didn’t get to all of the sessions they would’ve liked to attend, here are a number of videos taken at the Summit of various talks.

AAM Pty Ltd., a geospatial services and technology based in Australia, recently announced a merger with Vekta Pty Ltd., another industry leader in the geospatial industry. This merger takes Vekta out of the competition and positions AAM as one of the largest providers of geospatial services in Australasia and the Asia Pacific, as well as Africa.

According to ABI Research’s latest data on the Internet of Everything (IoE), there are more than 10 billion wirelessly connected devices in the market today; with over 30 billion devices expected by 2020.

“The emergence of standardized ultra-low power wireless technologies is one of the main enablers of the IoE, with semiconductor vendors and standards bodies at the forefront of the market push, helping to bring the IoE into reality,” said Peter Cooney, practice director. “The year 2013 is seen by many as the year of the Internet of Everything, but it will still be many years until it reaches its full potential. The next 5 years will be pivotal in its growth and establishment as a tangible concept to the consumer.”

Eric Webster, vice president of Exelis Weather Systems, talked recently about the company’s efforts along with NASA Langley Research Center to evaluate an Exelis instrument to determine its effectiveness for measuring CO2 from space.

As public safety moves closer to a nationwide Next-Generation 9-1-1 system, Geographic Information Systems will play an ever-increasing part.

By guest writer, Anthony Haddad, Sales Engineer, Intrado

The use of geographic information systems (GIS) is not new to public safety. It first came on the scene as an important tool with the introduction of wireless 9-1-1 service when location information could not be derived from a fixed service address. In today’s legacy architecture, geocoding or plotting X,Y coordinates is often used in conjunction with mapping applications to help dispatch responders to the correct location, but that has been the extent of its application.

Public safety agencies have been collecting GIS information for decades in order to populate the information found in selective routing database (SRDB), automatic location information (ALI) and master street address guides (MSAG). When an emergency call comes into a legacy GIS-equipped PSAP, associated addresses or X,Y coordinates are delivered as well, though the coordinates are meaningless on their own. In order to be valuable, this data must be plotted on a map in either the call-processing or computer-aided dispatch (CAD) environment. Once plotted, the information can be applied to perform dispatch functions. In this way, GIS is a supplemental tool used to verify location alone.